Tech Blog

To resize VMs using PowerShell with PowerCLI from a csv list, first install the software:

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=PCLI650R1&productId=614

Then create a list of servers to resize and save it as a CSV file in C:\temp\VMs.csv:

Save the below as Something.PS1 and run from PowerCLI

Note: Change VCENTRE to your vCentre, this script will TURN THE SERVER OFF then give each VM two CPUs, one socket and 5GBs of RAM.

Just a quick one, to install RSAT on Windows 10 1809 via PowerShell:

then check:

Got this today while connecting to Event viewer on a remote windows 10 machine:

To Fix remotely:

How to disable Dedup:

First an important point about disabling dedup (via GUI or PowerShell), when you disable it only stops further deduplication from occurring i.e data that has already been deduplicated will remain deduplicated

If you want to “move” the data back to the original files and out of the deduplication store (Chunk Store) you need to use powershell command

You can check the status on where this is at by using

Here’s another gotcha, chunk size (love that name) will not get smaller until you run two more commands, GarbageCollection and Scrubbing.  GargabeCollection will find and remove unreferenced chunks and scrubbing will perform an integrity check but this wont work unless dedup is on….so enable dedup:

Then run garage collection:

Once your drive is small again then disable dedup:

Found a drive was running low on space today and on closer inspection with tree size I found that ChunkStore (brilliant name) was taking up the drive space:

Odd as it looks as dedup wasn’t working:

To fix it I ran the following PowerShell:

What does this do I hear you say, Garbage collection is the process to remove “data chunks” that are no longer referenced i.e. to remove references to deleted files and folders. This process deleted content to free up additional space. Data scrubbing checks integrity and validate the checksum data.

To monitor it I ran:

This seems to have fixed it for me:

My colleague Welsh Dai made this sweet bit of PowerShell to see the ratio of physical CPUs to Virtual CPUs:

Here’s a picture

Hi All,

A chap called Michael Grafnetter has created a brilliant PowerShell script to check password hashes in Active Directory against a list of simple or common passwords.

This is great to encourage users not to use obvious passwords, for example if a company is called Contoso then you’d want to encourage users not to use Contoso1 etc.

Here’s how:

Download the software:

https://github.com/MichaelGrafnetter/DSInternals/releases/tag/v2.22

Copy the DSInternals directory to your PowerShell modules directory, e.g.

Launch Windows PowerShell.
(Optional) If you copied the module to a different directory than advised in step 4, you have to manually import it using the Import-Module .\DSInternals\DSInternals.psd1 command.

Next create a text file called passwords.txt and fill it with passwords you’d like to scan for, example:

Then here’s an example script:

First set the password txt file.

Then set the Domain Contoller, in this case DC1

Then set the distinguished name of the OU and sub OUs you can to scan:

Note ” and ‘ are not showing up properly,

$dictionary = Get-Content passwords.txt | ConvertTo-NTHashDictionary Get-ADReplAccount -All -Server DC1 -NamingContext ‘dc=adatum,dc=com’ | Test-PasswordQuality -WeakPasswordHashes $dictionary -ShowPlainTextPasswords -IncludeDisabledAccounts

My Windows 10 client wouldn’t connect to our Direct Access severs today, kept just getting Connecting

So to troubleshoot I’d recommend:

Checking your internet connection:

Now its worth running some PowerShell commands to get the actual error:

This likeley means your proxy is in the way of your connection.

Check the settings:

Get-NetIPHttpsConfiguration

Double check your internet connection

Test-NetConnection

I think its time to check the proxy settings:

Check if you can get to a website via IE and try via another browser such as Firefox.

If you cant then check if your proxy is off:

Now check the windows 10 proxy and the Netsh proxy:

Windows 10, turn it off:

Check the netsh and then turn it off or reset it to IE:

When reset should look like this:

Failing that reset the IP Helper in services.msc or reboot:

The netsh settings fixed it for me, the reason I’d set it was to allow PowerShell out to the internet for Exchange 365 work.

Change the DNS from a list of servers:

As per the title, find the DNS addresses from a text list of servers: